/Lately there’s been this feeling over me, this ineludible, unshakeable feeling that someone is after me. I wish I could describe it (how do you describe feelings? They’re hard), but I can’t. I’ve just got this feeling that I’m never in private, that my every movement is under careful observation, that someone has my routines and schedules mapped and on a calendar, heavily marked up. And on this calendar, one day is circled in blood-red ink. If perchance this day exists, I know that upon its arrival I will cease to be.
Life is Hell right now. I check in each corner and behind each door before I enter a room. I leave the lights on wherever there is a fixture. Where one is lacking, I've set a lamp. The backseat of my car is entirely fearsome. But nighttime is the worst. Sleep’s now an insensitive joke to me. Why try? High doses of adrenaline have replaced it. With the adrenaline come nightmarish thoughts. The sound of the ticking clock on my wall, for example, has become unrejectable to my ears. I fear one day it will be replaced by a stranger’s heartbeat, so close I could feel the palpitations possess my chest cavity and rock me like music. But what's more torture to my soul is thinking how the clock is ticking away each of my seconds, knocking off each narrow moment before I reach the day circled in red. Thing is, I can’t get rid of the clock. I’m afraid more that I’ll hear the noises that aren’t it. As paranoia-inducing as it can be, it has a function. Without it I may no longer grant myself to excuse other noises that aren't it as the noises of the clock.
I keep wondering why I can’t be at peace with my passing if my life is enslaved to fear. Is it my young age? No, I don’t think being seventy would allow me to welcome death. I feel unconsummated. There’s something missing that I don’t have. Show me seventy and I still won’t have it. I know the reason I’m afraid. The reason I’m afraid is simple: everyone’s story is the same. You could read the same eulogy at every funeral: He lived, he loved, he lost, he died. How we wish we could escape it and beat our fate. How we wish it would never end. But it’s strange still. Our life could be the most tortured and chain-bound life and still we’d fight the impulse to die. What is that? I don’t know. What makes us want to live even when life isn’t worth living?/
This is the paranoia of Bryana Holly. Terrorized by the imaginings that anyone who casts a glance might be more than a passerbyer. He might be her end. She’s hired a bodyguard, but who’s to say one day, for the right price, he won’t be bought? It doesn’t help that the authorities might also be paranoid. They have a suspect they’re looking into, but they don’t know if he’s the one--if they’re being overzealous, if he’s been set up, or if he is a legitimate mafia. All the while the stalkers have persuaded a local to join their cause.
The threat to Bryana Holly calculates to be a very real one, so one might ask for a better definition of paranoia. Is it paranoia if in fact her fears are reality?